I must have listened to that Carole King album -- "Tapestry" -- a thousand times with my college friends. I seem to remember playing Hearts -- the card game -- and ignoring the moon landing.

Driving out Mineral Point Road as the radio show began, I loved the song he played by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who, he said, must have influenced a lot of guys to play electric guitar. He was effusing about the way she looked, and told us we could look on YouTube and find a clip of her "that'll blow your mind." Okay, Bob, I found the clip:

I wanted to write down the name Sister Rosetta Tharpe, so I wouldn't forget it, and I considered trying to write and drive at the same time. I got out the Uniball and, for paper, opened to a blankish page of that Entertainment Weekly in my handbag, but then I thought better of it and just started hoping for a red light. But the red light wasn't long enough, so I pulled into a parking lot and took some notes. I wanted to remember to tell you these two quotes he recited:

"Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him! We should also respect the enemy in our friend." Friedrich Nietzsche

Driving again, I noticed the clouds looked really strange, and I had to stop again for some photographs:

I turned onto Elderberry Road to get these shots, and it took me on a country drive I hadn't bumbled into before. It curved all around and by the time it ended, it was called Schewe Road.

Great show today, Bob. The best one yet. Next week, the theme is "Radio." The only song that it seems you absolutely must play is "You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio" ... "If you're driving into town/With a dark cloud above you/Dial in the number/Who's bound to love you."

What is it about Tapestry that was so compelling? To answer swbarns, I avoid the mainstream and go for the streaming. As awful as Yahoo! is in many ways, their AI based music system has provided me with some interesting paths to explore.

The best version of a "Sweet Jane" is Two Nice Girls "Sweet Jane With Affection". They combined "Sweet Jane" with Joan Armatrading's "Love and Affection." Beautiful. Worth the effort if you can find it.

The thing about missing the moon landing reminds me of a Simpson's flashback, where Homer missed the moon landing because he was listening to the Archies, "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" on headphones while sitting in a bean bag chair.

I saw the Carole King performance clip on VH1 Classic this weekend, and she can not and should not dance. I think Will You Still Love me Tomorrow is brilliant, but that chick dances like Elaine from Seinfeld.

Did anyone see Music Makes Your Brain Happy in Wired today? What fascinated me was the bit about how studies of music and the brain have "told us how the brain deals with patterns and how it completes them when there's misinformation." Wouldn't growing up with different types of music make our patterns (and perhaps logic) also different? Is that why we all can't just get along?

Citizen Deux: "Tapestry" had great songs and a poppy but soulful singing voice. But I never even owned that record. We played Hearts at my friend's apartment, and that was her main record. That and "Tea for the Tillerman." And "Every Picture Tells a Story."

Ignoring the moon landing is really something to think about. It says a lot about what fools we were back then. I think our attitude was that anything connected to Nixon was contemptible. What kind of ridiculous bullsh*t distraction was that when people were dying in Vietnam?

Anyone who has seen the movie Amelie has seen a small video clip of Sister Rosetta; she uses the clip in the video montage that she gives to Monsieur Dufayel. Judging by his reaction in the movie, he'd never seen Sister Rosetta either. *grins*

SteveR: We shunned all the moon landings. I remember seeing one on TV and all we talked about was how stupid the American flag looked (supported on a post, because there was no wind). We just laughed at it.

I feel kind of like that today, hearing about the Jim Crow Version of Survivor.

How could we as a society have allowed something that was as truly horrible as racial segregation, to be transformed into the vapid?

Considering that segregation was associated not only with racism, but also with violence including lynchings, bombings and the burning of entire communities to the ground, in which every day was a struggle just to survive, for segregation to be re-introduced on a show called, 'Survivor' is beyond ironic.

That's a fair question, Maxine. One answer is that in many, many places, gays still do need that protection. There's a long stretch of distance between gays and straights going to the same music clubs and after-work, relax with your friends bars, and bars where young, single people want to hook up with each other. Not all gay bars are about sex, just as not all bars full of young, heterosexual people are about sex, but, well, a lot of them are. And aside from the sex, it's still not safe in far too many people for gay people to be obviously gay.

God, what a jaded subgeneration Ann's was -- too cool to get excited about the moon landing! The forever footprint in windless moondust, the fun of leaping like a kangaroo in 10% gravity, the eco-mandala revelation of the Whole Earth . . . far out, man!

I was one of those who ignored the moon landings after the first. Which was kind of surprising since I had previously followed space exploration avidly and even memorized every human who had ever gone up.

I'm sure part of it was age (18) and the times, but there was something more. Getting to the moon and beating the Russians was cool but after that we weren't accomplishing anything. That flag needed a horizontal stiffener because there was no wind on the moon to make it unfurl. The moon was orders of magnitude less hospitable to human life than Antarctica, and orders of magnitude harder to get to. It was a dead end.

Jumping in 1/6 (not 1/10) gravity would have been great but I was never going to do it. The only people who would were very fit government bureaucrats. Even if by some miracle I did, I would have to be encased in a bulky space suit, which would have taken away a lot of the fun.

The last person walked on the moon more than thirty years ago. No one has seen fit to spend the money to do it since.

I confess I didn't watch the final moments of the landing either. But in my case it was because I was too emotional. I knew it would be replayed, anyway. My 14 year old self went out back, climbed a tree and sat there staring at the sky - and I don't remember the moon being visible that July afternoon - trying not to cry. I still tear up at the sound of those beeps backing up the words "The Eagle has landed."

Dylan, like David Bromberg and other folkies from that era were serious musicologists. I'm a big fan of radio shows by professional musicians. WCRX here in Detroit has Alice Cooper on three or four nights a week and though I'm hardly a fan of his music, he's a knowledgeable music fan and the show is great fun. So is van Zandt's Little Stevie's Garage.

You mentioned singing a song to a different melody. I've always been intrigued about how one song evokes another. Dylan himself once told a story about how while writing a new song he had to keep playing another song to keep the motif he was trying for in his ear.

Steve Kimock does a great cover of Favorite Things. I once asked him if he could do a medly of Favorite Things and Take Five by Paul Desmond. He brightened, smiled, and said, "That would work." I'm glad someone else could hear the similarity.

WDET, the local NPR station that decided that lefty politics was more important than lefty culture killed their daytime music variety shows. I was driving late at night and heard a great cover of Hendrix's Voodoo Chile, with a vocal chorus scat singing the wah wah riff and I realized that another voodoo tune, Dr. John's Walk On Gilded Splinters would fit just right. You can easily go from one song to the other.

Heck, the Dead would do what their fans called the Mexicali Tease (from Mexicali Rose) as an intro to Big River.

I was a huge space buff and missed the Apollo landing anyway. I was at summer camp and there were no tvs available to the campers. I did listen on a small transistor radio, and still have the Detroit News and Freep from the landing though - along with an original box seat from Tiger Stadium that I recently found out is worth about $400 on eBay.